Mobile electronic devices (such as smart phones, personal digital assistants, computer tablets, and so on) are ubiquitous. Mobile devices provide advanced computing capabilities and services to users, such as voice communications, text and other messaging communications, video and other multimedia communications, streaming services, and so on. Often, users, via their mobile devices, access such services as customers or subscribers of telecommunications carriers, which provide telecommunications networks within which the users make voice calls, send text messages, send and receive data, and so on.
The telecommunications carriers can provide their customers and subscribers with various plans of service. For example, the carriers can offer and provide contractual subscription plans, where a customer is locked into an ongoing plan for a certain duration of time. As another example, the carriers can offer and provide prepaid, or non-contractual, plans, where a customer determines, during or after each segment of the plan, whether to renew and continue with the plan.
Currently, there are many carriers offering potential and current customers a variety of different varieties of both the contractual and prepaid plans of service. For example, one carrier can offer a low cost, prepaid plan, where a customer receives a basic menu of services (e.g., unlimited voice and text communications, and 1 gigabyte of data per month), as well as a higher level, and higher cost, plan, where a customer receives an enhanced or greater menu of services (e.g., unlimited voice and text communications, and 4 gigabytes of data per month), while other carriers offer similar plans and services.
The prepaid accounts, as they are limited both in services and access, can be cumbersome to manage and/or utilize, especially when their associated users are unable to update or recharge the accounts per usual mechanisms (e.g., online recharging interfaces are unavailable to the users). These and other problems exist with respect to providing prepaid accounts to customers of a network.
The drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. Similarly, some components and/or operations can be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments of the present technology. Moreover, while the technology is amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the technology to the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the technology is intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the technology as defined by the appended claims.